The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych)

by Adams, John Joseph

  I looked at the floor. “For human research, but I’m hoping . . .”

  Again I paused. He’d already finished his muffin. I leaned forward to pull the last of mine apart, sweeping some crumbs into my hand that I dropped onto the floor when Michael looked away.

  He looked back at me and slid forward in his chair. “All living creatures share intelligence and emotion, with differences being in degree, not in kind.”

  I nodded. “Exactly. I mean, a human baby isn’t any smarter than an octopus, yet people are okay with killing and eating them. But killing a baby, oh, no, that’s not allowed.” I tensed. Was that too much? “I mean like when Jonathan Swift said—”

  “That a young healthy child, well nursed, is a most delicious and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled . . . ?”

  I laughed out loud before I could contain myself, earning the stares of people looking to see what was so funny. Nobody I knew would have even understood that reference, never mind being able to come up with the quote.

  Michael smiled at our shared secret. “I realize you’re being dramatic to make a point.” He shook his head and his smile disappeared. “Original sin. If anything, we should be atoning for the sins we’ve committed against all the living creatures we’ve murdered to satiate our own appetites. Speciesism is a terrible thing . . .”

  A warm tickling began in my toes, rising up through my groin and into my cheeks. Did he really just say that?

  We chatted about our feelings toward food and what food had feelings until Michael had to go. I bid him farewell, then rushed to the ladies’ room. I waited until it was empty, leaned over a pee-spotted toilet, and stuck a finger down my throat.

  • • • •

  A few weeks later, the meetings and coffees had become a regular thing; Michael and I even joined the next church session together. He shared some of his war stories, and I shared how I’d lost my brother over there, even opening up about my parents and the recent accident that had stolen them from me. I was busy demolishing another muffin, pecking crumbs from it, when Michael finally asked.

  “Do you want to join me for dinner at my place next week?”

  “I’d love to,” I answered. I felt a flush. I tried to remember if I’d turned down the heating when I left the house. Had I locked the door?

  “Wonderful. I’m having some friends over for a special meal.”

  I looked down, knocked a few crumbs into my lap. “Of course.” I’d thought he was inviting me there alone.

  “On one condition.” Michael glanced at my muffin. “You must eat absolutely everything that I serve.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny or serious. Nodding, I pulled my hands back and burrowed them into the pockets of my coat.

  Michael raised one hand like an oath. “Promise.”

  Forcing a smile, I pulled out one hand and raised it. “I promise.”

  Excusing myself, I headed for the bathroom.

  • • • •

  I stopped at the top of the subway stairs, my teeth aching from sucking the cold winter air. My stomach hurt, but not like usual. I wasn’t good with new people. At the lab, this worked in my favor. Just me and my slides and whirring centrifuges. No idle chitchat needed, and most of my colleagues fell into this same spectrum of awkwardness.

  A fresh coating of snow squeaked underfoot on the sidewalk outside. At his address, I looked up and saw lights on, people framed in the window, talking, holding drinks. Maybe I should go home, tell him I wasn’t feeling well. I looked at his door. Did I lock my door? Stop it. Even if you didn’t, you can’t go back now. And then his door opened, spilling bubbling conversation onto the street.

  “Effie! Come in. Come in!” It was Michael.

  Smiling, my internal debate settled for me, I trotted up the stairs.

  Michael took my coat and hung it in an entrance closet, then ushered me inside. The entranceway led into a large main room with high ceilings and ornate moldings. He led me to a side table where a cauldron was steaming on a hot plate. Dipping a ladle into it, he filled a small china cup.

  “Mulled wine,” Michael explained, offering it to me.

  I nodded and accepted the cup from him.

  “I thought it would be a nice antidote to the cold,” Michael added. “Glogg you Scandinavians call it, yes?”

  I didn’t usually drink much, but I could use one now.

  Michael turned to a small man standing next to us. “Ah, Martin, I’d like to introduce you to someone. Effie is a synthetic biologist . . .”

  Blushing, I glanced at the floor and took a sip from my wine.

  Michael grimaced. “I meant Dr. Hedegaard is a synthetic biologist, please excuse my familiarity, I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t be silly,” I whispered, leaning in and grabbing his arm. “I’m just embarrassed at the attention.”

  “Synthetic biologist. Very interesting,” said the small man, smiling and ignoring our exchange. He was short—stooped—with gray stubble atop his head and photoreceptors shining in his empty eye sockets: artificial eyes. He looked familiar. “Do you view your work as a continuation of natural evolution?”

  I nodded and tried not to stare at his synthetic eyes. “Depending how you think of it. If you think a termite mound is natural, then so is a machine gun. Everything is natural.”

  “And what do you think of the natural state of human evolution?”

  “A dead end,” I said without hesitation.

  The man’s artificial eyes glittered.

  “Dr. Hedegaard is a very passionate,” Michael laughed. “And on that note, I must attend to dinner.” He disappeared into the kitchen.

  Left alone in a room of strangers, I’d usually melt into a corner, but here I became the center of the party, dragged into one fascinating conversation after another. It was a breath of fresh air to be in a room of intellectual equals, somehow feeling like I was back in my lab, safe and in control.

  While we chatted, I inspected the guests. Many had a prosthetic limb, and not hidden, but exposed. Proud, even. One of them ventured that he was in the wars with Michael. Makes sense. I didn’t mention that I’d lost my brother there. Wrapped in my layers of clothing, I began admiring their sleek metal prosthetics.

  Michael swept back into the room.

  “Dinner is served!” he announced.

  Smiling, the small man with artificial eyes bowed to allow me to walk ahead of him. The guests moved into the dining room, and aside from the chair at the head of the table, only one other seat was left empty. I sat and arranged myself, smoothing the napkin in my lap. The first course was served, and I nodded thank you as a waiter placed a plate before me.

  I recoiled.

  It appeared to be some kind of meat, but perhaps it was imitation? Michael appeared from the kitchen and sat beside me, hoisting his champagne flute into the air. “A toast!”

  Everyone else raised their glasses. I fumbled for mine.

  Michael looked around the table. “A toast to old friends.” He made eye contact with each person in turn, nodding and smiling, and finished by looking at me. “And to new.” He clinked my glass. “A toast to the truth, to sacrifice, and to the brotherhood of all things living!”

  “To sacrifice!” erupted a chorus around the table.

  I raised my glass and took a sip before inspecting my appetizer again. Everyone else began eating.

  Michael was watching me. “Trust me, Effie.”

  The way he looked at me made me think of my father when he’d taught me to swim, late in my childhood. I’d been terrified. Let go, Effie, my dad had whispered, holding me close, trust me. Swimming was now one of my greatest pleasures.

  Picking up my knife and fork, I sectioned off a piece of the thing on my plate and placed it in my mouth. I chewed. The texture was soft and salty, recalling a distant memory of pork. I hadn’t eaten meat since I was a pre-teen and had declared my parents murderers. The memory made me ill.

  Michael’s pros
thetic hand, now oddly warm, was on my forearm.

  “Trust me,” he repeated.

  I made a promise, I reminded myself, and so I smiled and swallowed and began carving off another piece. I fought down each bite, resisting the urge to escape to the bathroom. Just when I’d finished it, the main course was served.

  My heart sank.

  In a large serving dish in the middle of the table, a bone protruded rudely from flesh that fell away into caramelized onions and roasted potatoes. The circling waiters began serving thick slabs of what must be meat.

  Is Michael making fun, taking advantage? I panicked, with only Michael’s steady gaze keeping me from flying into space. Poking at my potatoes and carrots, I ventured to try a scrap of the meat.

  Popping it into my mouth, I chewed, tears in my eyes, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. Pulling Michael to me I whispered, “What is that?”

  He smiled. “The more relevant question is: Who is that?”

  “What do you mean, who?” I hissed.

  “Effie, I think you have just tasted human flesh for the first time.”

  The conversation around the table stopped.

  I gagged. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Michael remained still. “In fact, tonight you are part of a very special evening. Tonight I am sharing my flesh, my body with all of you.”

  I looked around the table. Nobody else was even surprised. They looked pleased.

  The joke was on me.

  I fought back the simultaneous urge to throw my plate against the wall and to empty the contents of my stomach all over the table. The cloying smell of decay rose up from my plate. Without realizing it, I was already standing.

  “This is sick,” I cried, staring into Michael’s blue eyes, “I thought—”

  “You thought you were eating an animal? Some poor creature who could not choose this fate? No, Effie, I choose this. I give freely—”

  I convulsed. “No. Nobody would—it’s too disgusting.” Now I was sure I was going to throw up.

  But Michael held me. “Since time began, we’ve been consuming the Earth, consuming our fellow living creatures. Now we have the ability to sate our hunger by consuming ourselves. It’s the only way.”

  I tasted bile in the back of my throat. “Why would you do this?”

  “Because I’m a Christian. Are you not?”

  I nodded.

  “Is Christianity not a cult of cannibalism? Do we not make a weekly pilgrimage to eat the body and blood of our savior? We . . .” He extended his arms, palms up, toward his guests. “. . . have made our religion even more personal. Every one of us is our own savior containing that same spark of the divine. Just as consuming Christ is sacred, so consuming ourselves is a symbolic act that brings us closer to the god living in all of us—sacrificing a part of ourselves to atone for our sins, eating a small part of ourselves to atone for our share in mankind’s sins.”

  The blood drained from my face. “This is crazy.” But everyone was staring at me like I was the crazy one. “This is—”

  But I didn’t finish my sentence. Tears streaming down my face, I ran for the door and out into the cold, ripping my coat from its hanger on the way out. Pounding down the stairs, I skidded onto the sidewalk and sprinted away. Catching the cold metal of a railing at the subway entrance, I leaned over and began retching and crying in heaving sobs. An automated transport growled past, and I imagined myself falling in front of it. The stars were bright diamonds overhead, out of reach in a dead black sky.

  • • • •

  I stared at my reflection in the bedroom mirror. Flaccid skin hung in bunches from my knobby bones. That’s not me, that can’t be me. In disgust, I covered myself with my gown and shuffled to the closet to begin layering up. It was past noon already. I hadn’t been out of my apartment in days, had been forcing my dog Buster to do his business on my tiny fifth floor balcony. Everything was an effort. During the day, I could barely keep my eyes open. At night, I’d lay awake, my thoughts swirling and frustrations mounting.

  My phone chimed. I groaned but accepted the call. My boss’s face appeared.

  “Dr. Hedegaard, will we be seeing you in the lab today?” He wasn’t buying my excuses anymore. “I don’t need to remind you that you’re the leader of this project team. A physical presence is still required from time to time.”

  “Yes, yes,” I scowled. Even working from home, exhausted, I was keeping up with my workload, probably putting in twice the number of hours as anyone else. While not everyone had God-given intelligence, everyone could at least work hard, and my boss failed in both categories. For the hundredth time I asked myself why I submitted to working for him, for them.

  Weeks had passed since the dinner. I was ignoring calls from friends. When isolation overcame exhaustion, I’d take Buster out for short walks. The people passing me on the streets, the cars, the looming lampposts, the newspaper boxes with their horrific headlines—I saw everything as though from the bottom of a well. How can these people just chit-chat with each other? How does the world make any sense to them?

  I finally decided to attend another church meeting. I needed to find strength and salvation, to find some way out. Before arriving, I’d built up scenarios of how I would ignore Michael if I saw him, how I would give him a perfunctory hello and behave as if nothing had happened. As it turned out, he wasn’t there, and after the meeting, a desperation seeped in. Did something happen to him? Now I needed to know he was okay, even if I thought what he was doing wasn’t.

  Or was it?

  Who was he hurting? Nobody. I’d played back his phone messages over and over, his apologies, his clarifications for where the meat came from, that it was lab-grown replacement organs, that they weren’t butchers. Perhaps it was my own failure, my own closed mind that was the real problem. He might have explained it all to me first, but then I’d never have gone to his home. I thought about his friends that I’d spoken to there, how intelligent they were. Eating lab meat didn’t harm any animals, and it was genetically pure. The idea did make a certain . . . sense, I had to admit.

  After church, I rushed home and called him to accept his apology, to offer one of my own, but Michael didn’t answer.

  And he didn’t return my calls.

  • • • •

  “Five thousand dollars for peace of mind,” the med-world avatar said. I scrolled through the list of options: five grand for a liver patch, ten for whole one, twenty-five for a kidney and two hundred for a heart.

  Organ replacement was a big business.

  I’d done some research. Almost every time a human population faced an environmental collapse, it resorted to cannibalism as a way to rebalance: central Europe in the fifth millennium BC; the Anasazi in the 12th century; Papua New Guinea and Ukraine in the 20th century. The list went on and on as if it was a hardwired response to human-induced local ecosystem collapse. Now that local system spanned the entire planet. Human biomass would soon exceed 500 billion tons, more than any other single species, even Antarctic krill.

  What am I doing? I sighed and closed my tablet. Without missing a beat, the voice in my head answered, Why not, though? It’s not like I’d hurt anyone, and nobody needed to know.

  I made my decision.

  I logged back on and the med-world avatar said that I needed a medical center if I wanted a delivery made. One phone call later and I’d set-up a drop-off at a local clinic with my friend Mary. I finished our call with a promise to plan an evening together soon.

  Next thing, I was heading into the bathroom, wiping the inside of my mouth with a cotton swab and placing it into a double-sealed plastic bag. Moments later, I’d filled in the med-world forms and left the bag out on my balcony for a delivery drone to pick up.

  It was done.

  My phone rang. Michael’s number popped up. “Michael, hello! How are you?” I answered before the first ring had finished.

  His face appeared on my screen. “Very good. Sorry about not calling back right
away—”

  “Don’t worry, I was just making sure you were okay.” I paused. “I didn’t see you at the church meetings” —another pause— “and I’m sorry about your dinner. About the way I acted.”

  He took a deep breath. “That’s not why I didn’t return your calls.”

  My heart was in my throat. “No?”

  “No.” He wiped his face with his biological hand. “You have your own path to follow. Self-discovery is an important part of my faith.”

  “That’s . . . well . . . I understand.” I wanted to tell him how much I missed our chats—how much I missed him.

  “I’ve been thinking about you, Freyja. I wish you luck in finding what you’re looking for.”

  It was the first time he’d ever used my full name. The tingling warmth I’d felt when I first met Michael returned. “Thank you.”

  “You take care.”

  With a smile, he severed the connection.

  • • • •

  Fat snowflakes fell outside my kitchen window while jazz played inside. A real fire crackled in my old fireplace, the first time I’d used it in years. Buster was laid out at my feet as I prepared dinner. I dropped down scraps of veggies from time to time that he snapped up.

  An entertainment show was playing on the wall of my living room. “ . . . billionaire Martin Ludwig is continuing his buying spree . . . ” said the reporter. I glanced at the display, into glittering photoreceptors. It was the same face of the small man I’d met at Michael’s party.

  I knew he’d looked familiar. Returning to preparing my dinner, the voice inside my head said, You see? Those are the kinds of people you need to surround yourself with.

  Delivery of my liver patch had taken two weeks. During the wait, I’d started taking Buster for long walks, waking up early to get back on track with my gene therapy research work. I even attended a rally for ending animal farming.

  Slitting open the thermal bio-containment packaging that my liver had arrived in, I removed the organ. It was cold and wet, tinged purple and reddish brown. Closing my eyes, I squeezed it, trying to see if my proprioperceptive sense would magically expand to contain this new chunk of my flesh. I waited, eyes closed. Somehow it did feel like a part of me; somehow my skin sensed this wasn’t alien flesh.